Zero Point Zero One

So I had to go to town yesterday. I hate that. I dislike the interruption. I’m always much happier when I can simply, you know, sit still and work. Anyway… My toe hurt, so I had to go.

“You’re still losing weight,” the doctor said, staring at her iPad. “Fantastic!” What she didn’t know is that five minutes earlier I was standing on one foot on their official weigh station like a flamingo, my coat, shoes, billfold, keys, belt, phone, tablet, pocket change, and comb piled up on the floor beside me as I stared at the digital display with an intensity usually reserved for starting fires.

“Thanks,” I said. “Last time I was here I was still classified as ‘overweight.’ I needed to get those last two pounds…” Then the doctor asked about my toe and the subject of my weight was forgotten. (I don’t know what I did to my toe, but the toenail hurt like bejeezuz for a few weeks. The doc said I’ll likely lose the toenail as a new one grows in over the next eight or ten months. Ah well.)

As soon as I got home I checked my online portal. Sure enough, the clinic had updated my vitals. Right there it said, “Body Mass Index,” and listed a number. I did a Google search, “what is a normal BMI?” Click, click, click…

“Healthy weight: BMI is 18.5 to 24.9.”

My Body Mass Index?

24.89

I made it by 0.01%.

sweeeeeeeeet!

From about 2005 until fairly recently I’ve always hovered around two hundred pounds, occasionally bumping up to has high as two hundred ten or two hundred fifteen. I’m down to about a hundred seventy now, and have been holding there for the past few months. I’d still like to lose another ten or fifteen pounds, but it’s being stubborn lately.

A chart of my weight loss

Yay for me!

Facebook Addiction

The Facebook

Well, it’s been five weeks since I’ve really been active on Facebook. Every few days I stick my toe in to test the waters, but I’m not quite ready to dive back in just yet.

While I miss hearing what my friends are doing, I’ve learned a few things.

Over the years I’ve grown used to being able to snap a quick photo with my iPhone and post it on Facebook, or stopping for a moment to jot down a funny thought. I knew I’d miss the social connection of sharing, and I was fairly worried that my ego would miss the instant feedback I was used to getting. There’s nothing quite like getting seventy “likes” in an hour to make you feel loved — especially when life is difficult. And I did miss those things. As with any addiction, the first three or four days were startlingly difficult — I bet I absently reached for my phone fifty times a day to check in or to post some random thought, and each time I’d feel empty, isolated, and lonely when I’d see the FB icon wasn’t there any more.

But after a few days I stopped thinking about it so much. I quit feeling that I needed to share every thought. I grew used to the idea that I can actually survive on my own without the constant feedback. The addiction waned.

Beloved Wifey Dagmar quit the Facebook habit the same time as I, though she was able to completely disable her account, something I was unable to do (as odd as it sounds I occasionally need to search Facebook for photos to use in my customers’ ads, every few days I’ll see the instruction, “Just pull some of our photos off Facebook,”). After just a few days she commented, “You know, without Facebook I sleep so much better!” I asked her how that could be. She answered, “I alvays had a Facebook conversation on my mind. I’d vake myself up every half hour to check and see what people commented. Den I’d spend an hour looking at udder stuff and I’d get so mad at the politics that I couldn’t get back to sleep. Then vhen I did, I’d vake myself up again, all angry, to go look at it again.”

About a week ago Dagmar logged back into Facebook, automatically re-enabling her account. Within five minutes she was in tears. “I can’t handle it!” she cried. “Everything’s so split. I have so many notifications and messages from my friends I can never answer them all! It’s overwhelming! Und at the same time there’s so much hatred and ignorance – I don’t vant to see it! I’m so anxious!” She had me disable her account again and has never mentioned Facebook since.

I have to admit, my own mental health and well-being is MUCH better now than it was when I lived on Facebook. I had no idea how much the constant tension, the barrage of political animosity, the divided community, the lies, the sense of “us versus them,” etc. had bothered me. (My mother always said I was a very sensitive boy.) It’s easy to avoid the news if you choose — simply change the channel. It’s easy to stay out of divisive political conversations — simply change the subject or walk away. But on Facebook there’s no way to avoid what your friends post. If someone posts a political graphic, there’s no way to filter it out. So in order to see the good things my friends were doing I had to see the bad stuff as well…

I saw the other day on TV that Facebook, G+*, and other forms of social media are trying to find ways to sort out the fake news stories that were so prevalent this election season. Many political analysts feel that the blatant lies that were presented as true news stories had an impact on the outcome. Confirmation bias is hard to avoid — if you believe squirrels are responsible for climate change, you’re unlikely to fact-check an article that supports your belief. Political activists use that to their advantage, creating fictional news sites and writing articles with no basis in fact or truth — often designed to create anger and outrage — aware that those who already believe what they’re saying will accept their statements as truth without checking, and will likely repost the article, thus spreading the anger and outrage to those who lack the facility to understand the underlying principles. (One example of confirmation bias: A few years ago I reposted an article stating that FOX News was not allowed to air in Canada as Canada had laws against airing fiction unless the show was clearly labeled as such. I wanted to believe that was true and reposted without checking. It turns out that FOX does indeed play in Canada. I’d been duped by a fake article on the subject of fake articles.)

While I’m sure I’ll be back on The Facebooks someday fairly soon, I would be much, much more apt to rejoin my community if there were effective ways to filter content (I did use F.B. Purity, which helped a LOT and I highly recommend the software, but while it filtered out certain keywords it couldn’t filter graphics), and I’ll be much happier when the folks who do the coding at Facebook find ways to stop the fake news stories from propagating.

But in the meantime I’m enjoying my blog, I’m rediscovering how to write in complete sentences, I’m happy to have several more hours in each day, and I’ve got more peace of mind than I expected. I do miss my friends and the daily interactions, but people lived for sixty-gazillion years without Facebook just fine, and so am I.

 *Anyone remember that? Yeah, me neither.

Review

“What a stupid high price for a pair of socks!” I thought when I first saw these on Amazon.com. “I’ll never waste my money on something like that. How dumb.” I silently pitied the fools as I sipped my beer.

“Huh,” I said to the dog two days later. “I wonder what this is.” I set the mystery package from the UPS man on the table. We both pondered the box for a moment. Then, “oh no…” I looked at the dog. The dog looked at me. “I was drinking beer and playing on Amazon again, wasn’t I?” The dog giggled under her breath and sat down under the table in her usual “let’s watch the funny monkey-man pretend to know what he’s doing” pose.

Forty-five seconds later…

“OHMYGOSH!” I hollered, startling the dog. “THESE ARE FANTASTIC!” Had any neighbors pulled in at that moment and peeked through the frost-lined windows they would have seen an aging hippie, clad in faded jammie bottoms and a black T-shirt with a peace sign in the center, dancing around the living room like an idiot, pointing gleefully at his feet upon which were a brand new pair of stupid-expensive socks, and a Golden Retriever quietly snickering under the table.

I wore the stupid-expensive socks every day for a week, pausing every few days to stand impatiently (and barefootedly) by the washing machine. On day eight I ordered a second pair.

These socks are, indeed, very, very much worth the money! They’re snug, they keep their shape (or at least they have so far – I’ve had ’em probably two, three weeks now), they show zero signs of wear even though I’ve worn them daily. Best of all, they’re WARM. I work from home in an old farmhouse in northwest Iowa – the high temperature today is supposed to be about two below zero – so my feet are constantly achingly cold, even if I wear two pairs of socks and my flappy-flappy slippers… But since I’ve started wearing these socks my feet haven’t ached at all – I can easily walk on the old hard, frigid floors without worry.

Considering the fantastic warranty and the wondrous quality of these socks, they’re not so stupid-expensive after all – I anticipate a few pairs of these miracles will pay for themselves over time (I usually go through fifteen or twenty pairs of super-cheap tube socks a year), and the joy of having comfortable feetsies in the winter is something you young whippersnappers will understand someday…

Now where’s my beer – I have more shopping to do…

What’s Going On In There…?

For years I’ve fed the dogs and cats at exactly 7:20 every morning. An odd time? Yeah, but it’s how we do things I guess. Traditions start in strange ways… Years ago we used to kennel the pups until Wifey Dagmar left for work each morning. She’d leave at 7:18, the pups were fed at 7:20. It made sense. And even though Wifey hasn’t left for work in nearly two years now we still feed the dogs at 7:20.

This morning was pretty normal. The pups got restless around 5:30, I let them out to read their morning paper, they came in and snoozed whilst I worked until 7:19 at which point their inner alarm clocks went off with an uncanny accuracy that’s vaguely unnerving. I shooshed them out the door, got the kibble, “Okay, girls, calm,” I said as I unceremoniously dumped a cupful of dried nuggets into their bowls, the words forming clouds of icy vapor in the still winter air. They sat, Zoey by her bowl, Buttercup by the other, staring at me, quivering. “Free,” I said. By the time my mouth had started forming the letter “R” the girls were snout-down in the Heaven That Is Food.

I popped back inside to get another cup of food, this time for the cats. I often wished I had three hands so I only had to make one trip at feeding time. I put some nuggets on the table for Miss Mittens, opened the strongbox, nudged Nitty Kitty aside with my hand, and dumped the rest in the bowl. A few years ago Pops made us a smallish box with a kitty-sized hole in the front – I put the cat’s food in there so the pups can’t get to it. Every morning I smile a bit; as I feed the pups I’ll usually see two golden-green eyes blinking mysteriously at me from the depths of the shadowy kitty box, a small but fierce black kitty inkily biding her time in the safety of darkness… Nitty is the smallest of our family, a tiny cat. Yet she rules her kingdom with a firm, though adorable, black velvet paw – Miss Mittens (also known as The Lady Miss Waddlebottom) might be twice her size but Nitty always gets the food bowl first.

I stood outside for a moment and pondered the silent dawn creeping it’s way over distant frosted hills, the vibrant warm colors in the eastern sky giving false promise of comfort on a bitter blue December morning. A small bird, feathers fluffed out to double its size, sat in the pine tree a few feet away, staring towards the gathering light, hopeful.

Breaking the spell, the pups finished their food and eagerly traded places so each could examine the other’s bowls, hoping for an errant leftover nugget, snuffling and shuffling. I shooshed them back inside, Buttercup heading towards her kennel, Zoey to the other. Click, click, doors shut, I patter through the room towards my office as quietly as possible, but…

A muffled voice, “Honey? Can you shut my door please?” I turn back and peek into Wifey Dagmar’s room. A silent TV flickered away, merrily showing pictures to itself, absently casting light on a comfy lumpy bumpy pile of pillows and cushy blankets with a little nose poking out. The muffled voice spoke again from the pile of blankets. “I just fell asleep about half an hour ago… I vish these stupid meds wouldn’t keep me avake.” I obediently reached in to swing her door shut, soft snores from the blankets already competing with the quiet, ever-present whoosh-whoosh-pfffff of her oxygen machine. I’ve learned that her doorknob rattles, so I tend to simply give the door a bit of a tug with my finger and let it swing silently toward me, hinges oiled against squeaks. But today, “thunk.” The door hit Dagmar’s wheelchair. If her chair is pushed right up to her bed there’s about a quarter-inch of clearance to swing the door shut, but if there’s any gap between the wheelchair and the bed the door won’t shut. The snoring stopped as I stepped into the room and quietly pushed the chair an inch northwards, but resumed again as the door swung quietly shut, unobstructed.

Last summer I took the trim off the bottom two or three feet of her door so she could get the wheelchair in and out a bit easier – the wheels of the chair fit through the door, but barely. The extra inch of clearance makes a big difference, but it also means that when her door is closed there’s now an inch wide gap allowing light – and sound – into her sanctuary. It’s on my wish-list to widen her doorway and put a barn door (a door that slides back and forth on a rail outside her room rather than a normal swinging door) in someday so she can get her chair in and out easier – and park her chair in her room without worrying about it blocking the swinging door. But that’s a task for a different day.

I tippie-toed back across the living room to my office, eager to get back to work. But as I listened to the combination of gentle almost-snores and whoosh-whoosh-pfffff on the WIfey monitor I keep on my desk, I found myself almost haunted by a thought.

What does she think?

Most people enjoy a little alone time every now and then, but Wifey’s isolation takes “alone time” to completely new levels. Because of the immune system disorder not only is she always ill, but we’re always trying to avoid introducing her to any new germs… While we don’t turn people away at the door by any means, we also don’t particularly encourage visitors as Dagmar is invariably ill for days or weeks afterwards. And she never feels well enough to leave the house.

A photo of Dagmar swimming with children

Dagmar, before the illness. Happy, full days.

Her world consists of three rooms – bedroom, bathroom, and living room. Her social life consists of a television, a phone she can rarely use due to her pain, two dogs, and a husband who’s either working or sleeping. She’s usually awake all night, catnaps off and on through the morning, spending about twenty-two hours each day in her bed.

What does she think? What’s going on in there?

I can’t imagine the loneliness.

Running Scared

It’s a scary world. Petitions probably don’t do much but… I signed this one. I really don’t relish having a leader who takes the word of a former KGB agent at face value while denying solid evidence provided by his own intelligence community, a leader who says he doesn’t need intelligence briefings, a leader who wants to put bankers and CEOs in charge of our government in order to deregulate business blatantly putting profits over public safety (the only thing between food poisoning and your child are federal regulations, regulations they want to roll back).

We’re caught firmly in the cogs of the machine, my wife and I. We really need to keep them from turning it on.

Musical Mumblings

Me fumbling along on the bass to a 1969 song by Kak, a band I’d never heard of until friend Andrew pointed them out to me a few days ago.

“Lemonaide Kid”

 

And proving I have no pride, nor sense of shame, here’s me ruining the bassline to Los Straitjacket’s famed “Casbah”…

 

I highly encourage everyone to look up Kak and Los Straitjackets – there is some happy music to be had! As an example, here’s Los Straitjackets doing a version of “Sleepwalk” (rated PG-13) with Angie Pontani of the legendary Pontani Sisters…